Behold! Your new Mac file management system. A few global hotkeys makes it easy to use the keyboard to import files from other applications, including webpages, email from Mail, or whatever file you’re viewing in another application.

Speaking of Mail, most of us have email that dates back a decade or two and that begins to clutter Mail on your Mac. So, archive what you think you might need at a later date but don’t want visible to clutter up your daily email routine. EagleFiler archives email as email files, not as some clumsy text or RTF file.

This is two programs in one: The best email archiver I know, and a universal file manager. […] Besides that, it has an excellent tagging system, which can (optionally and on a per-library base) be isolated from the Finder tags.

As the years go buy a user’s Profile (Identity) gets larger and larger. I often see users with huge Profiles (Identities) 50GB and larger. Outlook has become sluggish under the weight of many GB of data. Not only is Outlook affected but on a small SSD drive, Outlook could be taking up the majority of space used. Consider this like a visit to your doctor. You can ignore the advice or wait until your Outlook Profile (Identity) has a fatal heart attack and you lose data.

EagleFiler with its fair $40 license let you do pretty much whatever you like. Great documentation and support available from Michael Tsai is personal and of high quality (I’ve had good answers myself as well as seeing much public praise for the support).

This is the story of a serious Mac app for serious Mac users. If your Documents folder is stuffed with all kinds of files and you’re adding dozens more each day then you know the value of good file organization.

It’s a pain. Files can be stuffed into folders by file type, by project, by date of use, or by Apple’s new but cumbersome tagging system in OS X. Is there a better way? There is and it’s beautiful, worth the money and the learning curve[…]

EagleFiler is the perfect app for Mac digital pack rats, those of us who capture pieces of information to, well, because they might be useful or valuable someday. Think of it as a digital file cabinet but capable of expanding beyond a single upright file cabinet to a whole wall of cabinets. […] EagleFiler handles multiple libraries so files can be organized to suit your workflow. Files can also be previewed within EagleFiler and some files can be created and edited. Each library can be encrypted and password protected.

Because its user interface is similar to Mail’s, Mail users may find it particularly easy to pick up. Unlike DEVONthink Pro Office, which uses a special database format to store and index its data, EagleFiler stores files in an easy-to-navigate Finder hierarchy.

EagleFiler has so many attributes that make it the perfect application to organize your paperless office that it requires a series of articles to cover, however, it is as easy as a Mac to use! Suffice it to say, “EagleFiler is a must for a paperless Mac office.” Even this article was written using EagleFiler.

From time to time I’ll run into a Mac app that’s been around awhile and asked myself, “Where have you been all my life?” even though I’m not anywhere near finishing up all my life.

In other words, it’s an app that is so good you want to tell friends and neighbors about it because it’s a solution that fits the problem so well […] a Mac app that is so wonderful at gathering and storing pieces of information in a hurry, storing it on your Mac, and making it drop dead easy to get to it.

EagleFiler also has a great clipper function. If you have a file selected, are viewing a web page, or viewing have email messages selected, hit the clipping shortcut (by default F1) and the information will be automatically imported.

Because email is so central to my business, I like to hold onto just about every message I send or receive. This means I have mail messages that I sent between the late 1990s and the present. Rather than storing years of these email messages in Mail, I archive them and store them in EagleFiler. In EagleFiler I can view the individual email messages including all of the header (to, from, date and subject) information and the message itself. I can also search for words contained in the messages. EagleFiler stores both the email message and the attachment.

The import worked perfectly, with EagleFiler bringing the mailboxes in fairly quickly, and preserving the entire folder structure for easy browsing. […] I find it easy to use, attractive, and entirely functional.

EagleFiler, on the other hand, simply leveraged the default applications I used with Mac OS X. PDFs opened in Skim, text files opened in TextMate (where I could then use TextMate bundles to convert formats between HTML, plain text, and Markdown), and RTF documents opened in Bean (which I’d adopted as a lightweight editor over the oh-so-bulky Microsoft Word). This made it a great fit for the new way I was working with documents. In addition, EagleFiler came with some useful capture functionality built-in, eliminating the need for some of my home-grown AppleScripts.

I am a complete and total pack rat, and I love how EagleFiler lets me organize all of my digital things, and I also appreciate how it allows me to access that data from anywhere, and from any application. EagleFiler is one of the applications that is constantly open on my desktop, and it’s used all day long. I know my hard drive would be an utter disaster without it.

December 2010 - OfficeforMacHelp.com recommends using EagleFiler to archive messages from Outlook and Entourage to prevent catastrophic data loss and if you need to move to a different mail program.

October 2010 - Matt Neuburg describes in TidBITS how he used EagleFiler to export his e-mail from Microsoft Outlook 2011:

So, with the new version of EagleFiler in hand, I selected all my messages in Outlook and told EagleFiler to import them by pressing the F1 key, right there in Outlook. In less time than it took to make myself a fresh cup of cappuccino with my handy-dandy Pavoni Napolitana, EagleFiler had grabbed all my mail messages and assembled them into mbox files, each file having the name of the Outlook mailbox or mail “folder” from which its messages came.

EagleFiler combines ease of use with an underlying ingenuity that makes it feel simple, fast, and lightweight. It’s packed with too many clever touches for me to list. The range of things you can import, of ways you can perform an import, and of smart things EagleFiler can do in response, is quite astounding…

I’ve just completed my 30-day trial, and I’ve grown enthusiastic to the point of dependancy. That speaks well for EagleFiler. I would say this app gave me much better focus into my documents, something that the Finder lacks.

July 2009 - Kate MacKenzie on using EagleFiler control information anxiety:

EagleFiler looks like other Mac applications; highly reminiscent of iPhone or Mail or iTunes, so it’s easy to use. Save email messages, bookmarks, links to interesting sites, project notes, PDFs, even complete web pages.…Searching is nearly instant using keywords, tags which you can create, and even phrase-based searches. It’s almost fun.

It’s a vital tool for the digital pack rat.…EagleFiler’s versatility lies in its ability to accept a myriad number of files and formats. The application’s tagging, note-taking, and searching capabilities make finding that one file you stored in EagleFiler a year ago and want to retrieve today a cinch.

Another nice document management program is EagleFiler, which is from one of my favorite companies, C-Command.…It’s rock solid. The nice thing about EagleFiler is that you can open separate files for separate projects.

Despite its unprepossessing version number, EagleFiler 1.4 is a big and worthwhile update to an already fantastic product.…If you have never given EagleFiler a try, now would be an excellent time to give it a whirl.

EagleFiler provides a simple way to keep track of documents, images, e-mails, and Web pages. Unlike other outliners, it uses the standard Mac filesystem and applications to help futureproof your data.

September 2007 - David Sparks reviews EagleFiler in episode 125 of the
MacReviewCast (audio starting at 10:28) and at MacSparky:

I like the user interface. It is clean and doesn’t get in my way. Unlike some of the other data management programs, EagleFiler seeks to organize all of your data. You can drop just about anything into it, including mail, Web pages, PDF files, word processing documents, and images.

C-Command, the makers of the excellent Spam filtering software, SpamSieve, have released an app called EagleFiler. This app seems to have existed under the radar for a little while now, but I thought it was time to give it a try. I’m now a die-hard user. Here’s why…

Press F1 and it’s saved. Fantastically useful, especially since
it saves all Web pages, PDFs etc in on your hard drive, not in a
proprietary format. I use it to keep track of Comments I make on
blogs and forums, and email messages I write to my writing students.

June 2007 - Leo Laporte features EagleFiler as his software
pick of the week on MacBreak
Weekly 45 (audio starting at 56:30).

EagleFiler stores files individually, in dedicated folders, and uses an SQL database to manage files and their contents. This meets my criteria for separate storage, and ensures that I can get files out of the application in the same format that they went in, because EagleFiler does not alter the formats.

I can drag an item from the EagleFiler “Records List” window straight
into the Curio “Idea Space,” and because Curio uses links to files in
the underlying file system (unless you specifically tell it to import
its own copy of a file), Curio references the same physical instance of
the item as EagleFiler. This gives me EagleFiler as the “filing cabinet
full of folders of stuff,” and Curio as the work space for aggregating
bits and pieces into a greater whole. It also gives me simple data
exchange between the two applications, without keeping duplicate copies
of documents, and wasting disk space.

Obviously EagleFiler isn’t the first product of its kind in this category but after using it for awhile, a few things become clear. The developer has done an excellent job of integrating it with the rest of the operating system. He’s also looked at the real world needs of people and how they interact with their information and then built a product around those needs.…It is a very mature 1.0 release and as long as he continues to listen to his users, EagleFiler has a bright future ahead of it.

Suppose we added yet more item types to the hierarchy, and we made them active, and we allowed them to have drags to assign or change behavior. I claim to have invented this and have explored all sorts of different behavior. It’s nice to see EagleFiler use it in a simple, elegant way. One sort of metadata that EagleFiler manages is the notion of a “tag.” The user can create these and they appear in a Tags folder. If you drag a file in EagleFiler to one of the tags (which exists in the same source list as other folders) the file gets assigned that tag. Tags are user-defined and have an icon or badge associated with them. It’s a clever UI for assigning metadata, and is generalizable to any outliner.

I was very impressed. It is more flexible than Yojimbo. Its open format makes it more attractive than SOHO Notes. EagleFiler doesn’t have the full range of extra features—syncing, blogging support, full-screen option, alarms, etc—that SOHO Notes provides. That’s a pleasing lack of feature bloat for me.

[The open library] is a dream feature for timid, uncertain users. And it’s what makes the application more of a true “filer” than some of the other solutions. While other apps do a great job of storing your information, you are not so free to dump the contents out on the floor and go rummaging through them. With EagleFiler, you can empty the filing cabinet before you burn it. Other applications tend to offer similar abilities, but only through explicit “export” commands, where the sanity of the resulting data is in the hands of the application. EagleFiler makes it easy to jump on board, because it’s just as easy to jump back off.